She laughed. “Of course! You said you were going to. I’m so scattered! Well — I’m sorry I disturbed you.”
“Not a bit. Nearly finished. Did you want something? Iced tea, maybe? Eleanor left things ready.”
“Later, perhaps. No, Duff. Don’t want anything. I’d forgotten the kids were going to be late. It’s their afternoon to sweep and dust and scour.”
His grin widened. “I’ll do it. Give me an excuse to put off mowing the lawn till a cooler day. Besides, I’m a talented house cleaner.”
She laughed again. Duff Bogan — Allan Diffenduffer Bogan — had been a boarder at the Yates home for more than a year. The luckiest boarder, she thought, that any invalid woman with three children ever had — though Eleanor couldn’t possibly be called a child any more. “You go back and finish.” Seeing he wouldn’t, she added, “Or at least put on an apron.”
He executed a comic salute and soon she heard a broom working upstairs. Not long after, came a bizarre din from the bathroom, and she lay on her pillows, chuckling.
He was, she thought, such a dear. A graduate student of physics at the University of Miami. He’d come over at the start of the first semester, the year before, when the Yateses had had a vacancy in the two-boarder schedule which augmented their slender finances.
Who’d brought him? One of Eleanor’s numberless admirers. She thought back. It was that fullback, she believed, the one with that absurd nickname — Avalanche, Avalanche Billings.
“We have to have,” she remembered saying to Duff, “somebody who can help around the place, take care of the yard and the station wagon — which is vintage and requires plenty of care. Somebody who can tend the trees and shrubs, won’t mind doing dishes at times, and so on. The rate is low on account of the help I need.”
Duff had regarded her amiably, even warmly, and replied, “Mrs. Yates, I was brought up in the family of an underpaid Indiana preacher. Housework, its simplification and efficient management, became one of my hobbies. I have other hobbies that might prove helpful.”